history – Freethinking Animal Advocacy

INFOGRAPHIC Agenda-driven research claims women were the primary hunters in hunter-gatherer societies?

May 16, 2024 by Michael Broad

RELATED: Quora deems picture of cat lying on back with legs splayed offensive My infographic summarises a dispute between two professors; one a Professor of Biology (Cara Wall-Scheffler) and the other a Professor of Anthropology (Vivek Venkataraman). Cara claims that in reviewing the accounts of anthropologists from the 1800s it was clear to her …

Pheomelanin in ginger hair greatly predisposes ginger cats to skin cancer

May 12, 2024 by Michael Broad

This is an entirely new idea. No one has proposed it before and it is speculative but based on good science. It is known that domestic cats with ginger hair are almost 18 times more likely to develop skin cancer than your typical domestic cat with a different coat colour other than white cats …

New smiling and loving cat emoji picture

May 12, 2024 by Michael Broad

New smiling, loving cat emoji with a transparent background

I am having some fun in instructing AI to create a new emoji cat image. I wanted a smiling, loving emoji cat and here it is. The background is removed so the image is exactly like a true emoji. The image format is WebP, a modern image format for files that are lighter and …

Maine Coon is described as a ‘natural breed’ but is it?

November 2, 2023 by Michael Broad

You see it often: cat show judges and even Wikipedia describing the Maine Coon cat as a “natural breed”. In fact, Wikipedia opens up with the statement that the Maine Coon cat is “one of the oldest natural breeds in North America”. It seems to me that the phrase “natural breed” is an oxymoron, …

Chartreux Cat Infographic

September 7, 2023 by Michael Broad

Perhaps the most significant two facts about this cat breed is that it is France’s only purebred cat and the breed standard has remained untouched throughout the breed’s existence in the cat fancy which started in the late 1800s. This is because the intention is to maintain the original appearance. You can see this …

The discovery that disproved that the Ancient Egyptians were the first to domesticate the wild cat

September 5, 2023 by Michael Broad

Credits:

The picture is deemed to be in the public domain
The words at the base of the image are from The Taming of the Cat published on the PMC Pub Med Central website.
Citation: Driscoll CA, Clutton-Brock J, Kitchener AC, O’Brien SJ. The Taming of the cat. Genetic and archaeological findings hint that wildcats became housecats earlier–and in a different place–than previously thought. Sci Am. 2009 Jun;300(6):68-75. PMID: 19485091; PMCID: PMC5790555.
Link to study.

P.S. I have one comment. It is possible that the cat in the image was tame and not truly domesticated whereas the Ancient Egyptians domesticated the cat.

The reason why humans and their pets might never have existed

September 1, 2023September 1, 2023 by Michael Broad

Early humans might have been wiped out by catastrophic climate change as their population had dwindled to less than 1300 adults of reproductive age because of droughts according to research.

There is an interesting article in The Times today, Friday, September 1, 2023 which I would like to discuss briefly. The title is “Early humans were on brink of extinction”. Remarkably the research that Kaya Burgess reports on found that the population of Homo sapiens’ ancestors dwindled to less than 1300 adults about 900,000 …

A cat mouser in A.D. 1000 in Wales was worth about £13 in today’s money

August 26, 2023 by Michael Broad

Howel the Good and 'The Hywel Law Book' or ‘Cyfraith Hywel'.

The Prince of Wales in the year 936 was Howel the Good – Hywel Dda – and he made himself famous in cat history by introducing special laws to protect domestic cats. It seems to me that he is the only leader to have valued kittens and cats in a very precise way which …

+ More